Inside The Collapse Of The New Republic

[n2doc]

BY RYAN LIZZA


Last Friday morning, Chris Hughes, the owner of The New Republic, and Guy Vidra, the magazine’s C.E.O., presided over a meeting at the publication’s Penn Quarter offices in Washington, D.C. It had been a busy twenty-four hours: a day earlier, Hughes had forced out the magazine’s editor, Franklin Foer, and Vidra had announced that the hundred-year-old opinion magazine, which was founded to “bring sufficient enlightenment to the problems of the nation,” would be reduced from twenty to ten issues a year and would move to New York, where it would be reinvented as a “vertically integrated digital-media company.” Minutes before the Friday meeting began, most of the magazine’s writers and editors had resigned in protest.


Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook with an estimated fortune of more than half a billion dollars, bought T.N.R. in 2012, and the Washington headquarters was a reflection of his ambitions. The office is bright, with an open floor plan for writers and a row of well-appointed editors’ offices with windows overlooking the National Portrait Gallery. Bound volumes from the magazine’s history line a long wall, and a small library decorated with photographs of T.N.R.’s founders and early contributors serves as a retreat for quiet reading. Hughes signed a ten-year lease and told his writers that the magazine would stay in Washington for a long time.

As the remaining staff gathered around a long conference table, Vidra set up a computer with his notes on it. Hughes joined from New York via a video-conferencing system.

Vidra read from his laptop. Hughes had hired him in October from Yahoo, and he spoke in a Silicon Valley-inflected jargon that many of T.N.R.’s journalists found grating and bewildering. As soon as he arrived, he embarked on a project to transform the modest-circulation journal of politics and culture into something more like a technology company. In conversations with Foer, he deemed it necessary to rid the staff of old-timers who he believed were ill-suited for the transformation.

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-collapse-new-republic

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Ironically, The Newsroom mimicked this 2 episodes ago.

Or I should say TNR mimicked The Newsroom, since the show had been written and filmed earlier.